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The Garbo of Fashion

Kate Moss backstage at a Paris fashion show in 1991.Credit
David Turnley/Corbis

LONDON

SEATED in a private upstairs dining room of Lemonia, a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill on the north side of Regent’s Park, Kate Moss gazed around with a conspiratorial air and put a match to a Marlboro Light.

“There’s nobody here,” she said. “Do you think they’ll mind?”

No they won’t, any more than anyone seems to mind what Kate Moss gets up to anymore. When Ms. Moss was captured on camera snorting what was said to be cocaine in 2005 at a London recording studio, the furor that followed tabloid publication of the grainy images died down with surprising alacrity. Far from ending Ms. Moss’s career, the episode upended the clucking of moralists and her professional reputation soared.

Ms. Moss’s bad-girl image has always been good for business, at least since the days of heroin chic and somebody-feed-her-a-cracker. Now, at 38 — an age when even the luckiest in her field have typically been tossed on the ice — Ms. Moss can boast of numerous advertising campaigns; more editorial work than any one glamour puss can reasonably handle; a new husband (Jamie Hince, of the band the Kills); a $13 million house in North London among whose previous owners was the opium-addicted poet Samuel Coleridge; and the December cover of Vanity Fair.

The news peg for the latter is “Kate,” a tombstone-sized picture book from Rizzoli, a lavish greatest-hits album of Ms. Moss’s fashion work through the nearly 25 years she has been a fashion celebrity. The pictures, by virtually every important fashion photographer, attest to her enduring appeal. And the scant text, by Ms. Moss herself, provides a pretext for the detonation of tiny bombshells about her scandal-prone life. The Vanity Fair interview, by a longtime friend, the biographer James Fox, can be read as a series of revelations or else as evidence of the canniness (reveal a little to conceal a lot) of a professional who long outlasted her contemporaries in the business, transcending a job description as humdrum as model to become a verifiable star.

Like a silent-film actress whose career has unfolded in stills from an ongoing movie, Ms. Moss evolved in public from waif to runway goddess to rocker chick to demi-legend, all the while developing a business empire and enthralling a curious public partly by keeping her beautiful lips sealed.

Now, at last, Garbo speaks. She speaks to this reporter in one of two interviews granted in connection with the release of “Kate.” There are predictable shockers. Ms. Moss never took heroin, she said, was not anorexic, couldn’t stand her looks and suffered teenage trauma when she was asked to straddle a shirtless Marky Mark for a Calvin Klein campaign. It will surprise no one that the narrative she is keener to put across is sharply at odds with the tabloid tales of an unrepentant party girl whose all-night raves at the Ritz in Paris are a fashion-world legend and who has spent so much time as tabloid prey that her daughter’s first word, she said, was “Nazzi,” a child’s version of paparazzi.

“People forget I go to work,” Ms. Moss said. They forget that the Coleridge house was bought and paid for by the daughter of a travel agent and a barmaid from what the actor Richard Burton once described as the nightmarish “featureless suburb” of Croydon. “Modeling is a job,” she said. “Even my mum doesn’t believe that I do work hard.”

Photo

The pictures in "Kate" are by virtually every important fashion photographer and attest to her enduring appeal.Credit
Pietro Birindelli

Unlike Garbo, whose sphinxlike silence concealed a stolid bore, Ms. Moss is as compelling in person as in front of a lens, quick to mock herself, to offer a bite of her lunch, to throw her head back in easy girlish laughter. The designer Vivienne Westwood once chalked up Ms. Moss’s personal appeal to her “punk attitude.” Mike Figgis, the director who shot a short film starring Ms. Moss, said he was mystified by her allure. While a coat on anyone else is just a coat, Mr. Figgis said, a coat on Kate Moss magically becomes something you want to borrow and wear.

“It’s very difficult to describe how she kept herself so on top of her game,” the photographer Juergen Teller said recently during a break from shooting a new Marc Jacobs campaign. “I’m going to go away from the photographs for a moment and say what it is about her as a person, in a way.”

There is about Ms. Moss, he added, “this amazing phenomenon, yes, but more to the point, this incredible free-spirited, animal-like-ness, which is so mesmerizing.”

And there is, of course, the face.

“I never liked it,” Ms. Moss said of her face, eyes widening as a waitress laid plates of hummus and tabbouleh on the table. “I think I ordered too much,” she said, before tucking into a dish of halloumi with gusto.

Swigging from a can of Coca-Cola (not Diet), Ms. Moss said: “I wasn’t the prettiest girl in class. No breasts, short legs, gangly teeth. I didn’t think I was model material, that’s for sure.”

The woman who has been featured on countless magazine covers (30 times, at last count, on the cover of British Vogue) added offhandedly: “I think they’re all right, my looks, now. But I’ve never seen myself as sexy or a side of myself that boys would like.”

Whether boys did, the camera always has. Like those of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, another beauty of the photographic era, Ms. Moss’s eyes are almost abnormally wide-set. Her high cheekbones not only set off a strong jaw but lend her face an ethnically indecipherable cast. Her ripe mouth, the upper lip fuller than the bottom, is what she terms her “most recognizable feature,” by which she means it is how strangers and the paparazzi always catch her out no matter how she disguises herself. “Even if I wore a hat and a wig,” Ms. Moss said, making a frame of her hands and placing it over her mouth. “You can always tell it’s me.”

Her teeth, even now, are irregular and pointed. And that in itself, say those in the business, tells you something worth knowing about Kate Moss.

Photo

Jamie Hince and Ms. Moss at their wedding last year.Credit
Jonathan Short/Associated Press

“She’s not conventional at all,” said Fabien Baron, the editorial director of Interview. Mr. Baron, who did the art direction of the new book from Rizzoli, met Ms. Moss nearly two decades ago, when she was hired for a Calvin Klein campaign he oversaw. “She would come out of the Calvin meetings, saying, ‘Fabien, Fabien, do you think I should do my teeth?’ ” he said. “But she never fixed anything. She’s not perfect at all physically. You have to deal with the little teeth, the crooked legs. She has the mental power to put it forward.”

Paul Cavaco, the creative director of Allure magazine, said: “She had this energy, a power, that doesn’t let you objectify her. If Kate is going to be objectified, she’s in on it. She’s done it before you get the chance.”

Shy at the start of her career, asking men on photo shoots to turn their backs when she was naked, Ms. Moss was surprisingly quick to adapt to the demands of her business and craft.

“In the beginning, I thought I’ll do whatever it takes,” Ms. Moss said with a laugh. “Anything to get out of Croydon.”

Whatever it was about her — punk attitude, renegade spirit, a teenage pout — she became a darling of designers like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, an editorial darling and a favorite on catwalks like Dior and Chanel.

“Right from the start, I thought I’d rather shoot with Corinne and not get paid than do catalogs,” Ms. Moss said, referring to Corinne Day, a photographer who, more than anyone, was responsible for exposing Ms. Moss to the public at a time when supermodels with their Olympian beauty were the vogue. “I don’t think my agents were very happy about it at the time,” Ms. Moss said.

Even now the 1990 photographs that Ms. Day took for “The Face,” of Ms. Moss on a beach in Sussex, England, topless and wearing a feathered headdress, look improbably fresh. “I’ve done a lot of nude pictures and it doesn’t bother me at all anymore,” Ms. Moss said. She has appeared naked enough that, while “Kate Moss” is a document of the model’s career pitching designer creations, it is surprising how seldom she seems to have been wearing clothes.

“When my daughter opened the book, she said, ‘Oh no, mummy,’ ” Ms. Moss said, referring to Lila Grace Moss Hack, 10, her child with the editor and publisher Jefferson Hack. Ms. Moss vowed to her daughter that there would be fewer crotch shots in the next book. In it, she said, she might compile only paparazzi pictures, because her personal and fashion life often seem to converge in a record compiled by people who surreptitiously check into hotels where she is staying or hide in the bushes behind her house.

“I didn’t expect it at first,” she said of the stalker tactics. “Johnny used to go mental, and it was really bad when I got pregnant and was vulnerable,” she added, referring to Johnny Depp, her ex-boyfriend. Of the paparazzi, she said, “These kind of men are pigs but, you know, some of them I’ve known so long they don’t bother me so much anymore.”

Ms. Moss gave an amiable shrug and then fished in her big Balenciaga bag for a fresh cigarette.

“Kate takes life to the full extent,” said Mr. Teller, the photographer. “I’m not talking about taking drugs or being drunk. She’s someone who is completely in control of her destiny. Instead of a model coming along and saying, ‘Oh, yeah, do what you want to do,’ she’s basically very powerful, powerful to meet and to be with. And she’s incredibly fun to be around.”

She is quick at lunch to prescribe as a hangover cure her favorite, Coca-Cola and aspirin. Waving away mild injunctions laid down by her handlers against discussing ex-boyfriends and scandal, she says it was Mr. Depp who taught her how to tame the tabloids with silence (“Johnny Depp said: ‘There’s so much rubbish they write about us, whether you tell them what is true or not, it’s better if you don’t tell and say nothing. They’ll write what they want anyway.’ ”) and girlfriends who encouraged her to have the anchor tattooed on her forearm one “night in Ibiza when we were all drunk.”

She talked openly about the competition, expressing admiration for the versatile Brazilian beauty Raquel Zimmermann and a hint of lust for the Dutch model Lara Stone. “I think she’s very hot, with her boobs and her teeth,” Ms. Moss said, referring to Ms. Stone’s gaptoothed smile. “Though my husband says she’s not his cup of tea.”

Speaking of the model Christy Turlington, one of the Three Graces of the supermodel era and a woman Ms. Moss once considered a paragon, she revealed some of the edge that has kept her relevant to fashion. “The last time I saw Christy, she was wearing a twin-set,” Ms. Moss said. “You can think twin-set, but you can’t wear one.”

Kohle Yohannan, curator of “Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion,” a 2009 blockbuster at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, “Kate Moss has had a very modern, kind of James Dean, approach to fashion and the monster of fame.” What she embodies, he said, is hardly rebellious; modeling is by definition passive. Yet it is not too much to suggest that, even doing nothing, or embodying beauty ideals she can hardly be thought to believe in, Kate Moss brings to any image in which she appears an ineffable quality.

“All these years, she hasn’t spoken, she hasn’t done interviews and so we know her from the image,” Mr. Baron said. “But the imagery is of characters she’s playing. It’s not her.”

Her job as she sees it, Ms. Moss said while politely asking the waitress to carry her half-eaten meal downstairs to a table where Mr. Hince awaited her, “is to be that character, to act and move like that other person that people imagine.” Her gift, as it happens, is that she’s not very good at this part of the job.